Today, we are excited to announce the next generation of our Fire HD 8 tablet lineup, designed with the entire family in mind. Customers can enjoy a faster performing Fire HD 8 lineup with an improved experience to handle common daily streaming needs.

The all-new Fire HD 10 tablet is available today for pre-order and will begin shipping October 30. The Fire HD 10, which runs on Amazon’s latest operating system Fire OS 7 (based on Android 9 Pie), includes a new, faster processor, faster charging, and longer battery life.

We’ve all read the declarations that tablets are dead. In reality, tablets—and smartphones for that matter—are just enjoying longer lifespans. Though shipments of tablets are down globally, the market remains considerably large.

Mobile and living room devices today present a varied landscape for developers to consider. One aspect that is particularly meaningful for your customers is where your app installs itself. Some devices, like the current Fire tablets and Fire TV have external storage through memory card slots. Other devices, like Fire TV Stick or older Fire tablets have only their internal flash storage. Running out of storage when trying to install a new app can be very frustrating for people who want to use your app. This frustration is compounded for customers who have added a memory card with lots of empty space and still get an error message that the device is out of space when trying to install. That frustration can quickly find its way into negative reviews for your app.

Luckily, for most apps, Android provides a simple solution. By specifying the installLocation in the app manifest, you can provide your user community with the best experience possible for whatever device they own. This doesn't mean they'lll never run out of space, but it helps best manage the space they have.

The Amazon Appstore has always persevered to make apps more discoverable and to get you more downloads. To align with this goal we’ve introduced a change that will help customers see the most relevant reviews; reviews that reflect your hard work in app updates and improvements.

Customer Reviews Are Now More Contextual

Today, we are happy to announce our newly enhanced Ratings and Reviews system. Going forward, customer ratings and reviews will be more app-specific, taking into consideration the device type and app version, which ensures that customers see the most accurate rating for your app.

Previously, customers who read reviews on their tablets or other devices saw reviews sorted by helpfulness; reviews that received the most votes. Now these top votes reviews for past versions will no longer surface above latest version reviews. Instead, customers will more easily see reviews for the actual version they are downloading. This means reviews that mention past bugs will rank lower than reviews for the latest version of your app. This new sorting process will be visible on Kindle Fire tablets and for Android Apps first. We expect to launch it on Amazon.com, FireTV and in the Developer Portal shortly thereafter.

On November 3rd 2015 300+ attendees, two tracks about monetization and gaming, 13 sessions, multiple guest speakers and the Amazon Appstore evangelists animated a very successful developer-focused conference: the Amazon Appstore Developer Summit 2015, which took place at CodeNode, London.

The Amazon Appstore Developer Summit focused around unique insights into the Amazon Appstore ecosystem, emerging user interfaces and devices that are driving new user behaviors, like Fire TV and Amazon Echo, and new business models like Amazon Underground and Merch, which are opening up opportunities for customers and the developer community.

Here you can find the recordings of all the sessions, complete with slides, organized by topic:

Simply drag and drop your Android APK into the App Testing Service and in as little as 90 seconds you can receive a detailed report of potential issues that could affect your apps’ compatibility with the Amazon Appstore – including guidance on how to resolve them before publishing. You can view the test results which will include screenshots, logs, CPU and Memory utilization information from actual devices that we run the automated tests on using Amazon appXplorer. We will also detect and flag crashes during the automated tests that will help you identify potential compatibility issues of your app.

Unity 5 has some great tools to help build great 2D games for Amazon Fire TV and Fire tablets. Here are two videos that walk you through how to use Unity’s Sprite Animation tools and also how to set up complex Animation States. I walk through the foundation of setting up Sprite animations and then show you step by step how I link up different states such as walking, running and shooting together so you can control them via C#. Check out the videos here:

If you are looking to learn more about making 2D games with Unity for Amazon devices or game dev in general make sure to check out my daily Twitch stream from 9am to 12pm EST.

Publishing to the Amazon Appstore

If you are a first time game developer or a seasoned pro, the Amazon Appstore is the perfect place for your latest creation. Publishing to the Amazon Appstore is free and easy, especially if you are already building Android games. We offer some great tools and services to help make your game more successful like Amazon IAP, Ads, Merch, Underground and our collection of Fire OS devices. Here are some additional links to help you gets started: